Sadonazism in Film, Part 3

2,731 words

Original in Czech: https://deliandiver.org/sadonacismus-ve-filmu-cast-3/ 

Translated by Ondrej Mann

In the 1960s, kiosk “pulp magazines” named after German military prison camps “Stalag” (short for the German Stammlager) became popular in Israel. Among other things, they aroused and titillated the sexual fantasies of Jewish men with alluring blondes in flattering uniforms that revealed their ample bosoms, “SS women” torturing and humiliating Anglo-American prisoners in every way possible.[1] The artistic and, above all, commercial success of The Night Porter (see previous article), which fits into the general mood of “sexual liberation,”[2] emboldened producers to bring this “Holocaust pornography” to the big screen.

The very first film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, (1975, directed by Don Edmons), loosely based on the real Ilse Koch, alias “The Beast of Buchenwald,” became a cult classic for a certain type of viewer, earning a tidy sum and spawning a whole series of films, mostly Italian co-productions with titles that are not even worth translating: Le Deportate della Sezzione Speciale SS (1976, directed by Rino di Silvestro), Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandatur (1976, directed by Sergio Garrone), L´Ultima Orgia del III Reich (1977, directed by Cesare Canevari), Kaput Lager—Gli Ultimi Gionri delle SS (1977, directed by Luigi Batzella), KZ 9—Lager di Sterminio (1977, directed by Bruno Mattei), Elsa Fräulein SS (1977, directed by Patrice Rhomm), Train Spécial pour SS (1977, directed by Alain Payet), SS Lager 5—L´Inferno delle Donne (1977, directed by Sergio Garrone), La Svastica nel Ventre (1977, directed by Mario Caiano) and others.[3] The most attractive girls and young women are at the mercy of psychopaths in white coats, brutal guards with whips, and cruel lesbian supervisors in chic black uniforms.[4]

Their “action” repertoire includes, among other things, forced and closely monitored sex between female prisoners and war invalids or mentally disabled persons, meticulously carried out corporal punishment for the slightest transgression against “order,” mass rape and mass executions, where “the dead can dance” under machine gun and submachine gun fire, etc. [5] These “SS happenings” usually take place in the last months of the war, in a strictly closed, totally controlled “extermination camp” with inhospitable “chambers” and sophisticated “experimental laboratories.” We will not dwell further on this debased “camp” (in the true sense of the word) production; those oddballs who are attracted to it for some reason can familiarize themselves with it on their own.[6] Let us move on to the magnum opus of a man who enjoys the reputation of being one of the most important artists of postwar Italy.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini) fairly faithfully follows the plot of de Sade’s first “philosophical novel” (which Buñuel had already used at the beginning of The Golden Age) and also uses the vertical arrangement of circles from Dante’s Inferno, which the “red” director transferred to the “black” Italian Social Republic of 1943 to 1945, whose government was based in the northern Italian town of Salò on Lake Garda.

In four “chapters” (Antinferno, The Circle of Manias, The Circle of Shit, The Circle of Blood), he depicts—undoubtedly with the director’s personal involvement (“Making a film means, at least for me, telling the truth about myself, about what a person really is”) the “pastimes” of four representatives of the local authorities (a judge, a duke, a bishop, and a bank president), who have Italian and German soldiers round up and gather in a remote classicist villa Emilia serail eight well-built boys from the common people and eight pretty girls from good families, where, encouraged by the stories of three former prostitutes (Signora Vaccari, Signora Maggi, and Signora Castelli) about the most bizarre “delicious pleasures” (piss etc.), they excite and satisfy themselves in the Hall of Stories and the Hall of Orgies by staging increasingly sadistic “rituals,” ending with numerous “philosophical comments” and the death of the “shockingly” raped and tortured youth… [8]

The poetics of this film, another “poem in the form of a desperate cry,” is supposed to serve as a guide for the viewer through the “terrible atmosphere of the time,” when “fascism, in its agony, gave birth to its most poisonous flowers,” illustrated in particular by the aesthetically “tense scenes” from the wedding celebration between the president and a boy dressed as a bride, where excrement is served as lunch, then from another wedding, where three dignitaries in women’s dresses marry three soldiers with the bishop’s blessing, and above all from the “final solution” in the courtyard of the villa (it is “mercifully” shot from a distance and without any real sound).[9]

However, even sympathetic “progressive critics” were unable to fully conceal their embarrassment at the raw and shocking nature of the film. According to conservative Marxists, Pasolini’s presentation of these morbidities is a “protest against the executors of power who consider themselves gods”—in the Nietzschean sense of “if there is no God, everything is permitted; just replace the word God with the word Power.” According to Freudo-Marxists, Pasolini thus expresses “his trauma from the objectification of sex in contemporary society, which, according to Marx, turns everything into a commodity, and where the psychology of the ruling bourgeois class is consumerism, which breeds neo-fascism.” That is why any emotional relationships are prohibited in the villa, and displays of affection and non-animalistic love are severely punished; those in power reduce the human body to an object, “libidinously” exploiting people—alienating them and appropriating even their sexuality. “Sodom” is thus a clear metaphor for a neo-capitalist society dominated by the “totalitarianism of consumption” (i.e., the awakening of new and ever more absurd desires, conditioning, and their ruthless and selfish satisfaction).[10]

In addition to these ideological overlaps, Pasolini’s “opus magnum” differs from the aforementioned “exploitative sado-porn” films with their cardboard props in its d’Annunzio-esque refined form: from the ceremonial costumes and black uniforms in which the powerful relish their “gestures,” to the arrangement of space and interiors with cubist works, through Delli Colli’s camera evoking old colored postcards in the opening landscape paintings, Morricone’s music alternating with passages from Chopin and Orff, to speech peppered with references to Baudelaire’s poems, Stirner’s reflections on the anarchy of power, the speeches of St. Paul, and futuristic “commandments.”

Pasolini did not live to see the premiere of this mannerist mixture of vulgarity and grandeur: he died in style, beaten to death with a stick by his young lover.[11]

An “original perspective” on the “history of Nazism” is also offered by Salon Kitty (1976, directed by Tinto Brass), through scenes from a classy brothel. SS commander “Blondie” (the excellent John Steiner) tasks his subordinate Helmut Wallenberg (aka Walter Schellenberg) with procuring twenty fanatical female compatriots for a “special assignment.” Wallenberg completes the task, selecting a wide variety of women from all walks of life. The girls must undergo entrance tests: first, they have group sex with soldiers, then they “service” various unsavory individuals, from criminals to old men to invalids. Wallenberg is particularly intrigued by the young Margherita, who comes from an intellectual family. He invites her to his apartment and sadistically humiliates her in order to personally test her devotion and boost his self-confidence. On September 1, 1939, as the owner celebrates the start of the war with her girls at the renowned Berlin brothel-cabaret Salon Kitty, her old friend Wallenberg summons her and informs her that the entire enterprise must be moved to a new house with new staff “in the national interest.” The experienced Kitty protests in vain. She has no idea that the exclusive establishment in a villa outside the city is intended for the “Nazi elite” or foreign clients of interest to the regime: every room is bugged and the girls are “required to report” on each of the guests…

Brass bases his film on the fact that during World War II, a brothel of the same name existed in Berlin for some time. Schellenberg’s idea serves as a starting point for him to develop a rather phantasmagorical spectacle around this theme: the pompous set design, bizarre costumes (Wallenberg’s extravagant “SS look”!), frenetic choreography of dance and musical numbers reminiscent of Fosse’s Cabaret, garish colors, a flood of nudity, S/M reinforced by “ideological deviance”. . . The interpretation of the “monstrosity of fascism” in connection with sexual perversions simply reaches its visual peak here, like an intoxicating collage of sensual impressions.

Music in pictures—music for the eyes, exhibitionism, posturing, provocation. One of the female workers, for example, can no longer endure the perversions to which she is subjected and goes mad; another is pregnant but refuses to have an abortion, so she is handed over for medical experiments; a third, for reasons unknown, prefers to hang herself. The plot is just a tragic farce: Margherita, originally a staunch “Nazi,” is “enlightened” by one of the random visitors and is helped in her “bedroom resistance” by the deceived Kitty and a regular customer, Italian diplomat Dino. Together, they manage to neutralize Wallenberg by recording his drunken monologue: he intends to use the compromising material he has collected against his debauched Parteigenossen and rise to the top himself, promising to take Margherita with him. The state will then be ruled by a pimp and a whore! [12] However, the conspirator is promptly denounced and ends up as a traitor, shot naked in a bath. The villa is bombed by the Anglo-Americans.

The sensation caused by this “neon sewer” was reinforced by the cast, especially the participation of “Bergmanesque” Ingrid Thulin as Madam Kitty and “Viscontian” Helmut Berger in the role of Wallenberg. The star couple first met “in incest” in “The Damned.” The cheeky expression and figure of Teresa Ann Savoy, who played Margherita, also caught the audience’s attention.

The role of Helmut’s wife Helga, who is of Jewish origin and therefore has to serve him (!), is played by the charmingly made-up actress Tina Aumont. Director Tinto Brass repeated this audience success with his Caligula. . .

Notes

1. This phenomenon was documented a few years ago by Israeli director Ari Libsker—Stalags (2008).
2. “Sadonacism” cannot, of course, be understood without the context of the “liberalization” of society and the “emancipation” of women—and “human beings in general.” Sexualization began in the “golden sixties” and was promoted on a massive scale not only by journalism but also by the film (and fashion) industry. The Swedish film Dom Kallar Oss Mods—They Call Us Mods (1967, dir.: S. Jarl-J. Lindqvist), a documentary about delinquent mods in Stockholm, was the first film intended for mainstream cinemas to show real sexual intercourse. The American film Deep Throat (1972, dir.: G. Damiano), with scenes that had previously been reserved for hardcore pornography—the “heroine” has a clitoris 23 centimeters deep, so only those who are sufficiently “well-endowed” can reach it – earned a million dollars in six months, while the cost of filming was less than $25,000.

An aging Marlon Brando performs the first “A-list anal” with a young Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (1972, dir. B. Bertolucci). The soft porn film Emmanuelle (1974, dir. J. Jaeckin) was the most successful French film of the year since its Paris premiere, with nearly 1.5 million viewers (ahead of the American blockbusters The Sting and The Exorcist). In the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses (1976, dir. Nagisa Oshima), a geisha strangles her partner during orgasm and cuts off his genitals. In Germany, between 1970 and 1980, the series Schulmädchen-Report (dir. E. Hofbauer) about the “exciting adventures” of schoolgirls was seen by over 100 million viewers.

Carefully staged depictions of perverse Romans appear in Fellini-Satyricon (1969, dir. F. Fellini) and of degenerate Rococo aristocrats in Fellini’s Casanova (1976, dir. F. Fellini), as well as a study of “religious homosexuality” in Sebastiane (1975, dir. D. Jarman) based on the legend of St. Sebastian; Jodorowsky’s strange “films” (The Mole, The Holy Mountain); Marco Ferreri (The Big Feast, The Last Woman), Waleryan Borowczyk (Immoral Tales, The Beast), Bertrand Blier (Les Valseusesl), John Waters (Mondo Trasho, Pink Flamingos) and Russ Meyer (Motorpsycho), to mention just the most media-friendly ones.

3. It is worth mentioning other sources here: firstly, the first half of the film Kapo (1959, dir. G. Pontercorvo), in which a Jewish director, sodomite, and communist (who even briefly emigrated to the USSR, but left the party after the Hungarian uprising) with the precision of a former documentary filmmaker, depicts the “atrocities of Hitler’s machinery” (the second half of the film clearly draws on many “Holocaust kitsch” films such as Schindler’s List, Colette, and others), and then Scorpio Rising (1964, dir. K. Anger), a short film, which emphasized the fact that “revoltless” bikers, initially from the ranks of veterans, liked to adorn themselves with their war trophies (“Nazi” patches, medals, helmets, etc.), which, in combination with their other attributes (black leather, shiny metal, bloody violence), in turn impressed various big-city S/M fetishists and voyeurs, to whose communities Anger “alternatively” belonged. Another similar “biker application”: Roger Corman, The Wild Angels, 1966.
4. On the fetishistic-erotic potential of SS uniforms and insignia, see the second part of Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” inspired by the SS Regalia catalog, which the author describes as a “breviary of sexual fantasy.”
5. Keeping the characters hit by bullets on their feet for as long as possible, writhing in pain, as if this were a rule of “spectacle” in other genres, from the gangster road movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967, A. Penn) to the adventure comedy The Green Ice (1981, dir. E. Day). One of the pioneers of this “marker” was Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch.
6. Mainly the films ” SS Hell Camp,” “SS Experiment Camp,” and ” SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell.“
7. Surr-salonard, Buñuel developed Sade’s idea that “love must be tempered in order to triumph over itself,” i.e., over its inhibitions imposed by “mere convention.”
8. Of all the other Sade film adaptations that have been made since the 1960s, and there have been quite a few (see, for example, Jesse Franco’s trash filmography), we must highlight Marat/Sade (1967, dir. P. Brook), which deals with the clash between Marat’s political idealism (seeking the happiness of society at the expense of the individual) and Sade’s cynical realism (advocating the right to happiness of the individual at the expense of all), whereby, as one reviewer noted, “their specific connection will lead to the Gulag and Auschwitz.”
9. It is significant that the “ascetic” republic of the “order of the fighting and faithful” (as stated in the fifth point of the “Verona Program”) was ultimately subjected to this obscure and mocking mask by the victors who massacred tens of thousands of its citizens. Let us remember Jan Hus in his paper cap painted with devils, the burned Templars, those “heretics” who, in their purity (Cathars), were accused of “terrible” heresies. Pasolini, incidentally, received a good Catholic upbringing, which shines through in most of his themes of “injustice and suffering in this world” and in his obsessive idea of “lending a hand” to all oppressed “sinners,” from delinquent outcasts, pariahs (Accattone, Mamma Roma) to madmen, cripples, and other lost souls (Rogopag, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pigsty). This upbringing naturally led him to fit into the ideological shell of Frankfurt-style Freudo-Marxism. The template is the same.
10. This is again an old Comintern thesis that fascism is the final stage of bourgeois society, a thesis that, in the eyes of the interwar “people,” was intended to disqualify a dangerous competitor in overcoming capitalism. According to its updated version, we now live in subjugation to “consumerist neo-fascism,” the “aesthetic dictatorship” of perfect model bodies, vivere pericoloso adrenaline experiences, the suppression of everything different, etc.
11. …who repeatedly ran him over with a car. There were also unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the murderer, claiming that he was a stooge acting on the orders of “neo-fascists.” Members of the National Vanguard (Avanguardia Nazionale) Stefano della Chiaie had already insulted Pasolini, who was “obsessed with death,” in 1962 after the premiere of the film Mamma Roma about pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, who are certainly far from the image of “great Rome” and its “she-wolf.”
12. A grateful cliché of Allied propaganda. For example, Rajmund Habřina could write in 1946, as a justifiably “angry petty bourgeois,” that “the animalistic Nazi attitude toward women grew out of the homosexual abnormality of Nazi heroes and manifested itself in numerous mental disorders. The loss or even inability to have a healthy erotic disposition, in which a man cannot be a man for a man, led the Nazis to perversity of the broadest kind; to pederasty; to unheard-of sadism.” (Nadčlověk a nadnárod, p. 58).
13. After the Princess of Fürstenberg (Ira von Fürstenberg), another “noblewoman” became a striptease doll for films during the years of the “economic miracle.”